The Gettysburg Bibliophile

It was a bright,
crisp Pennsylvania morning in November, 1863, when
Abraham Lincoln mounted a tiny horse and proceeded
from the Diamond in the center of Gettysburg, down
Baltimore Street to the Evergreen Cemetery. Lincoln
on horseback, with long legs dangling and coat tails
flopping, was far from an inspiring sight. But whatever
sense of the comical may have made itself felt, it
disappeared completely when the first strong words
of his address rolled out into the cool fall air.

"I was so close to the President," Mrs. John T.
Myers describes the moment, "and heard all of the
address, but it seemed short. Then there was an impressive
silence, like our Menallen Friends' Meeting. There
was no applause when he stopped speaking." Few knew
it at the time, but Lincoln had just uttered what
would become the most revered speech in American history.

Four months earlier, shortly after the Battle of
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin asked
David Wills of Gettysburg to oversee the cleanup of
the battlefield. Rather than hastily burying the
dead where they lay, Wills acquired 17 acres of land
for use as a national cemetery - a permanent resting
place for the dead of the battle.

Burial, or more accurately, reinterrment, began not long
after. On September 23, wishing to formally dedicate
the cemetery, Wills invited the highly respected Edward
Everett to give a speech. On November 2, 1863, almost
as an afterthought, Wills invited President Lincoln
to make "a few appropriate remarks." Lincoln accepted the invitation,
and gave a speech that lasted only a few minutes,
as opposed to Everett's two-hour oration. Everett
later wrote Lincoln saying “I should be glad if I
could flatter myself that I came as near to the central
idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in
two minutes.”

Of the five known manuscript
copies of the Gettysburg Address, two are held
by the Library of Congress. President Lincoln gave
one of these to each of his two private secretaries,
John Nicolay and John Hay. The copy on exhibit, which
belonged to Nicolay, is often called the "first draft"
because it is believed to be the earliest copy that
exists. The "second draft" was given to John Hay.
His descendants donated both it and the Nicolay copy
to the Library of Congress in 1916.

The other three copies were written by Lincoln
for charitable purposes well after November 19. One
copy was given to Edward
Everett, the other speaker that day. It is housed at the Illinois State Historical
Library at Springfield. A copy given to historian
George Bancroft is at Cornell University. A fifth
copy was made for Bancroft's stepson, Colonel Alexander
Bliss. This is the copy presently kept in the Lincoln
Room of the White House.

There are some of the sites in the town of Gettysburg related to Lincoln.

FREE SearchableMonument Database

Use our searchable monument
database to view images of your favorite monuments on
the Gettysburg Battlefield. Choose from hundreds of
historic photographs.

View 99Panoramic Photos of Gettysburg

The Virtual Gettysburg
CD-ROM includes 99 QuickTime VR panoramas that allow
you to stand all over the battlefield and look in
any direction. Click
here to see a sample of these gorgeous Gettysburg
views.